Authors: Imtiaz Gul, Dr. Farhan Zahid & Abbas Ahmad
Pakistan’s current security crisis is a direct result of both structural as well as trigger factors. The religious nature of the state i.e. Islamic Republic of Pakistan and its dispute with India over the Himalayan state of Kashmir represent two major structural factors. Both became even more pronounced during General Zia ul Haq’s era between 1977, when he seized power through a coup, and August 1988, when the C-130 aircraft carrying him and several other generals as well as the American ambassador crashed near Bahawalpur, central Pakistan. A lopsided notion of ‘strategic depth’ is another structural factor born out of the proximity to Afghanistan in the west.
Besides internal trigger factors such as serious fundamental governance issues, political instability, military interventions, and questionable law-enforcement issues, a tardy criminal justice, global geopolitics too, has contributed to its volatility as trigger factors, particularly Washington’s two campaigns – first against the former Soviet Union in the early 1980s and later against al-Qaeda beginning with the assault on the Taliban regime in October 2001 – Operation Enduring Freedom. On both occasions, Pakistan found itself under the rule of military dictators who were looking for international legitimacy, and thus became willing partners in campaigns which were geo-political in nature but entailed disastrous socio-political consequences for the country. Pakistan’s current crisis is therefore rooted not only in its own lopsided policies in the name of national security but also in the cold war which sucked it to two Afghanistan-based military campaigns – the first one raised the complex of Osama bin Laden-led jihadists, and the second one undertook to undo the same complex that had flourished under the Taliban
regime in Kabul.